From Star Destroyer to space crab: Life on Mars ‘discovered’ by UFO fans, ‘hidden’ by NASA (PHOTOS)

A levitating sphere, space crab and even Star Destroyer – recent NASA photos have been a treasure trove for UFO lovers who claim to have sighted alien-like oddities on Mars. RT looks at the recent discoveries.

NASA images of martian landscapes taken by the Curiosity Rover have sparked lively debates among alien hunters after they spotted several strange objects that look like UFOs, leading them to accuse the US space agency of hiding evidence of alien life from the public.

The recent discussion started at the beginning of August in the Facebook group ‘Journey to the Surface of the Mars’ with the slogan “They will not tell the truth about MARS.” It centered on the raw NASA image which in close up showed what appeared to be a crab-like creature. Some sci-fi lovers drew parallels with the creature from the “Alien” franchise.

As conspiracy theorists continued to study the Curiosity Rover images, the comments only became creepier. Users on such websites as the UFO Sightings Daily and areazone51ufos.blogspot.be wrote that they had spotted an alien “woman with breasts and long hair,” who had been “attentively watching” the rover.

Another publication on the website dedicated to paranormal sightings, suggested that a life form was visible which had a “single long eye, two long bent arms and a thin body” looking over the NASA rover.

One NASA scientist, who works on the Mars rover project Ashwin Vasavada, believes that the people who find such objects have pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon wherein one’s brain imagines a familiar pattern when there is none.

However, he told CNN that even investigations carried out by UFO believers help scientists. Just several days ago someone on the internet “found a place where a meteor had struck Mars while we were there roaming, so that is pretty fantastic,” he said.